I Wore a Wig to See If Men on Dating Sites Really Do Prefer Long Hair Over Short Hair

I started with Tinder. I created a profile with pictures of my short hair first. I swiped right on every single one of the first 100 profiles and then waited to see how many turned into a match. By the end of the first hour, I had 19 matches and seven messages. By the end of the week, I had 49 matches and 25 messages. A 49 percent success rate with matches isn’t bad, but I was confident that the profile with long hair would beat it.

So the following week, I made a new Tinder profile that was identical to my old one but with pictures of me with long hair (a wig, since i haven’t had long hair since high school) instead of my usual pixie cut. Once again, I swiped right on the first 100 profiles. After the first hour, I had eight matches and two messages—noticeably fewer than the amount that I had after the first hour of creating the short hair profile. Interesting, I thought, but probably an anomaly. Give it till the end of the week to catch up. By the end of the week, however, the long hair profile only had 38 matches and 15 messages.

That’s 22 percent fewer matches and 40 percent fewer messages than I received on my Tinder profile with short hair! I was shocked.

I conducted the same experiment simultaneously on OkCupid. Since OkCupid is set up differently from Tinder in that it doesn’t require a mutual match, I just created my profile and then sat back and waited. For my OkC profile with the short hair, I received 33 likes and 9 messages within the first hour. By the end of the week, I had 484 likes and 77 messages.

You know the drill by now: I created an identical profile with pictures of long hair for the second week. By the end of the first hour, I had 36 likes and 5 messages—pretty close to the short hair profile’s results. But then by the end of the week, the long hair profile had only garnered 237 likes and 31 messages.

That’s 51 percent fewer likes and about 60 percent fewer messages than I received with short hair. I believe the correct scientific term here is: Daayyyumn!

Here's a small sampling of the initial comments I received that were just about my short hair.